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Tuesday, 7 February 2017

The door is closing on Palestine.

At a time when the leaders of
Arab-controlled Ramallah continue their rejection of the Jewish State and their
civil society enemy in Gaza has launched more missiles at Israel and been
deprived of yet another terror cell in Hebron they continue to refuse to sit
and negotiate a permanent peace agreement.

They think they can weaken and
destroy Israel in stages by applying the alternative strategy of force and diplomatic
pressure.

They’ve got it wrong. They have
misread us. In the Bible they called us “a
stiff-necked people” and today this stiff-necked people are saying enough
is enough!

It’s time to reclaim our land. It’s
been out there dangling as a reward for Arab pragmatism, recognition of our
rights, and peace, but the olive branch has been knocked out of our hand by
their lethal ideology of a world without the Jewish State.

It has left us no other option
but to make a loud statement of intent that in the face of rejection, threats,
violence and non-compliance with signed agreements, Judea & Samaria not
only exists, it’s about to get stronger.

Since 1967 instead of accepting our
generous concessions they thought they could play an end game that would leave
us weaker and more vulnerable to a double sucker punch of terror and
international pressure which would take them along the path to what they call
the final solution of the Jewish problem in the Middle East.

All the evidence is there for the
compliant diplomats who have been dragging the dead carcass of a two-state
solution for decades even as they rip out the three thousand year beating heart
of Judaism from our grasp by calling it “illegally occupied Palestinian
territory.”

Their argument is that Israel was wrongly and illegally created
in 1948 on Palestinian land, that there is no such thing as an Israeli Arab,
they are “Palestinians of the Interior” or “Palestinians of ’48.”

In
other words they are Palestinians waiting to be liberated inferring that the
Jews have no claims to nationhood anywhere, that Palestinian Arabs are the
indigenous people and their rights will be honoured by their liberation.

That is
why the Palestine Liberation Organisation still exists with important relevance
to their leadership. Their charter still calls for liberating “every inch of
Palestine,” and to think that we play into that narrative with our blind
concessions.

On February 6, 2017, the Israel
Knesset passed an historic law that legalises our thousand homes and opens the way for Israel to claim long
awaited sovereignty over a part of Judea & Samaria known as Area C which, in
the signed Oslo agreement falls under the civil and security purview of Israel.

To the failing two-state diplomats
allow me to inform you that there are several valid alternatives to your failed
vision.

But let me put it bluntly. It is
way past time for diplomatic dancing. Let’s call the Palestinian spade the
bloody shovel that it is. Our generosity has been rejected and perceived as
weakness.

It is time for Israel to reverse out of the blind alley we have been
forced into by an international community unable to see they have become
willing hostages to a Holocaust denier in Ramallah and a radical Islamic terror
regime in Gaza.

In this dangerous neck of the
woods strength rules and you get devoured when you display weakness. Liberal niceties have little place in this
murderous region.

The time has come for
Israel to assert its legitimate and God-given rights and the world be damned
for not acknowledging them.

The door is closing on Palestine.
They had their chance and they blew it.

Barry Shaw is the Senior
Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic
Studies. He is the author of the new
best-selling book ‘1917.
From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’